ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; Whitney Whittles Intimate Corners

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: April 3, 1998

History under pressure. That's a good description of the inaugural display of 50 years of American art packed into the new permanent collection galleries at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Carved out of former offices on the fifth floor of the museum's 1966 Marcel Breuer landmark, these 11 svelte spaces are the first galleries in the museum's 69-year history to be dedicated exclusively to its own extensive collection.

After the debacle of the Whitney's overweening 80's master plan for a ponderous Egyptoid wing designed by Michael Graves -- an esthetic nightmare that was, thankfully, a financial impossibility -- these relatively small spaces have been exploited for every possible naming opportunity. The whole floor is called the Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Galleries; each gallery is also individually named for other donors.

This is an indelibly 90's expansion: modest, efficient and entirely internal, brought off without altering the building's outer skin and profile. It is the work of the New York firm of Gluckman Mayner, which also redesigned two brownstones on East 74th Street that now serve as the museum's offices and a connecting utilities tower joined to its south wall.

Compared with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney is still a David among Goliaths. Although the new galleries increase the museum's total exhibition space by 33 percent, they measure only 7,600 square feet, roughly one and a half times the size of a big Chelsea gallery.

At the same time, the 293 works on view represent little more than 2 percent of a collection that ranges over the whole century in an increasing number of media, from painting to video, and includes large holdings in the work of a number of artists, among them Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, Alexander Calder, Gaston Lachaise, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, most of the artists of the Stieglitz circle and Elie Nadelman, whose representation in the new galleries includes 59 of his tiny cast-plaster kewpie doll figures.

Still, the addition is a tremendous effort, and maybe a turning point in the museum's struggle to define itself and to improve a collection that has historically been seen as short on masterpieces and vision. (Another telling statistic: three-quarters of the works on view have been purchased since 1970.)

This has happened at the urging of, and with money from, Mr. Lauder, the Whitney chairman, whose board must now find a replacement for its director, David A. Ross, who is going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is paradoxical that Mr. Ross, after overseeing some of the trendiest, glitziest and most flamboyant shows in the museum's history, ends his seven-year term with such a traditional expansion.

The inaugural show makes a crowded march through American art from 1900 to, roughly, the brink of Abstract Expressionism. There are some nice vistas. Just off the elevator, across a gallery and through a doorway, the eye meets the serene eyes of Arshile Gorky and his mother, gazing out from the soft, glowing tones of Gorky's famous double portrait of 1937. Down a hallway, the quiet, spreading light of Hopper's ''Early Sunday Morning'' leads to a small gallery devoted to his work.

There is also a dense little cluster of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and nearly claustrophobic arrangements of sculptures by Calder and Nadelman. Alternating with these clusters are quick surveys, some markedly more interesting than others, of the Eight, the Stieglitz Circle, the Precisionists, the Social Realists and the early stirrings of postwar abstract painting. Similar ground is covered in a gallery devoted to works on paper, while a display of photographs, which the Whitney has only become serious about in the 90's, comes closer to the present.

The scale of the rooms may sometimes feel a bit shrunken. And their style may be a bit mongrel; they're certainly more in the Breuer building than of it. The newly exposed concrete beams, finished in gray tinted plaster and yielding three more feet of height, scream Chelsea; the blond flooring underfoot is very SoHo. The layout suggests a small American museum of the 30's or 40's.

And in the lobbylike opening gallery, where the Breuer stone floor is still in place, there's a quaint but sweet attempt to evoke the museum's early days on Eighth Street: a lovely pair of French doors in aluminum and molded glass by the artist Carl Walters; a generic three-maenads fountain by the museum's founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Robert Henri's weak, flattering portrait of her, reclining in exotic robes: Manet's ''Olympia'' as a Turkish pasha.

Still, natural light, a rarity in American museums, floods four of the galleries, underscoring the bright, airy feel of the rooms. Give or take a little gray plaster -- by now a Gluckman Mayner trademark -- the design is admirably self-effacing at a time when too many museums put architecture before art. And, anyway, many of the works from the first half of the century, for which these galleries were specifically built, never seemed at home in Breuer's vast Brutalist galleries.

Walking through the new galleries, one wonders why they didn't happen sooner.